John 1:2

John 1:2
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John 1:1–3 in the page showing the first chapter of John in the King James Bible
BookGospel of John
Christian Bible partNew Testament

John 1:2 is the second verse in the first chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.

Content

In the original Greek according to Westcott-Hort, this verse is:

Οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν Θεόν.
Outos ēn en archē pros ton Theon.

In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads:

The same was in the beginning with God.

The New International Version translates the passage as:

He was with God in the beginning.

Analysis

The author alludes to, or echoes, Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning...", but unlike in Genesis, his concern is with what was before the creation. There is also an allusion to Proverbs 8:22, "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His ways, before He made anything, from the beginning". For the German Protestant writer Heinrich Meyer, this verse "emphatically combines the first and second clauses of John 1:1 (In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God) in order to connect them with the work of creation". He adds that these words form the "necessary premiss" for verse 3, All things were made through Him ..., so that it can be stated that "if it was this same Logos, and no other than He, who Himself was God, who lived in the beginning in fellowship with God, and consequently when creation began, [then] the whole creation, nothing excepted, must have come into existence through Him. Craig S. Keener further situates the language against early Jewish wisdom traditions, in which Wisdom was celebrated as existing "in the beginning" and in which Wisdom, the Torah, and the Logos could each be called "the beginning", an idea Jewish teachers drew from Proverbs 8:22. He suggests that John stretches this familiar language to new bounds in order to communicate the identity of Jesus through an existing point of contact, comparing the way Paul had used terms such as "image" and "firstborn" in Colossians 1:15–20.

Keener observes that, taken together with verse 1, this verse completes a chiasm that opens the prologue, the closing phrase "in the beginning with God" (verse 2) mirroring the opening "in the beginning" (verse 1). He notes, following the French scholar Marie-Émile Boismard, that the three clauses of verse 1 are also linked by a Semitic device of anadiplosis, each clause taking up the last word of the one before (Word ... Word, God ... God). He regards the allusion to Genesis 1:1 as certain: the phrase "in the beginning" echoes the opening of Genesis and points to the literal beginning of creation, an allusion developed the following verse which speaks of all things being made through the Word (John 1:3).

D. A. Carson likewise treats the verse as a deliberate restatement of verse 1 rather than a mere repetition. Because the highly condensed verse 1 could be misread, the Evangelist "works backward" to make plain that the Word who is God is the same one who was "in the beginning" and "with (πρός, pros) God"; Carson notes that the verse specifically reiterates the middle clause of verse 1, that the Word was with God, and so prepares the way for the statement about creation in John 1:3.

Robert Witham notes that although the text has "this (ουτος) was in the beginning", the sense and construction is, "this word was in the beginning".

This verse is often used to confute Arianism, which holds that God was created in the beginning, while this verse seems to imply that the word (λογος) simply existed in the beginning, and therefore always existed. Cornelius a Lapide asks the question why a beginning is spoken of at all, if the word (λογος) is eternal and has no beginning. To this he answers, "because of the weakness of the human intellect, which is not able to comprehend eternity". Keener reads verse 2 as a recapitulation, for emphasis, of the intimacy of Father and Son "in the beginning" at creation (compare John 1:3; John 8:58). On his reading the verse carries a theological point developed across the Gospel: because the Word was eternally with God, those who reject the incarnate Jesus reject God himself; Jesus did not "make himself" God (John 10:33) but shared glory with the Father before the world began (John 17:5).

Commentary from the Church Fathers

Thomas Aquinas assembled the following quotations regarding this verse from the early Fathers of the Church:

References

  1. ↑ John 1:2: Westcott-Hort New Testament
  2. 1 2 René Kieffer [sv], 59. John, in Barton, J. and Muddiman, J. (2001), The Oxford Bible Commentary, p. 962, archived on 2 November 2017
  3. ↑ Meyer, H. A. W. (1880), Meyer's NT Commentary on John 1, translated from the German sixth edition, accessed 30 December 2023
  4. 1 2 3 4 Keener, Craig S. (2012) [2003]. The Gospel of John: A Commentary. Vol. 1. Baker Academic. on John 1:1–2. ISBN 978-1-4412-3705-7.
  5. ↑ Carson, D. A. (1991). The Gospel According to John. Pillar New Testament Commentary. Apollos. on John 1:2. ISBN 978-0-85111-749-2.
  6. ↑ Robert Witham, Annotations on the New Testament of Jesus Christ, Dublin: 1730.
  7. ↑ Cornelius Cornelii a Lapide; Thomas Wimberly Mossman The great commentary of Cornelius à Lapide, London: J. Hodges, 1889-1896.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 Thomas Aquinas, ed. (1874). "Catena aurea: commentary on the four Gospels, collected out of the works of the Fathers: Volume 6, St. John". Oxford: Parker. Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
Preceded by
John 1:1		 Gospel of John
Chapter 1		 Succeeded by
John 1:3